Too cool, part 18: Hubble turns 23

Twenty-three years ago today, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low-earth orbit (meaning about 555 km, or 345 mi, above the surface of the Earth.) Since that time, it has produced perhaps the largest body of work of any single telescope, and certainly some of the most detailed. And just recently, NASA released [...]

Too cool, part 17: Feynman lectures

I’m really not one for quoting others. It’s easy enough to find anyone who has the same point of view that you do, and hold them up as an example of someone famous or prestigious that ‘proves your point.’ This is perhaps doing a disservice to the other reasons to quote someone, such as [...]

Too cool, part 16: Now this is smart

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me about his young son, then three years old. It turns out the sprog was not only playing games on his folks’ computer, he had figured out how to install new ones on his own. This was not a child prodigy, and he wasn’t reading [...]

Too cool, part 15: Welcome our mantis shrimp overlords

I have been watching the development of the local praying mantises with interest, but this variety of ‘mantis’ is something else entirely. While at least one variety of these could supposedly be found in Florida when I was there, I never did locate one, which is perhaps for the better. But this means I [...]

Showoff

So yeah, I’m well outside of the range of the annular eclipse, still taking place as I type this I believe, and my friend in Kansas thought he was too. But at least he was watching carefully at sunset when he got the right conditions.

No filters needed when it’s this low on [...]

Too cool, part 14: Up close with the shuttle

Okay, first off, I apologize to those whose attention span will not be able to handle a 45 minute video – I know, this is the internet, the TL;DR Channel, where three minutes is a chore. Chill out, get a Pepsi or some tea, and stay on the same page for a bit (it’ll [...]

… and part two

There are actually two themes I’m continuing here. The first is the limits of our knowledge, which is a “half-empty” perspective; there’s a better way of expressing it, which we’ll get to in a moment. The second theme being continued here is special efforts made by scientists to communicate their work to the general [...]

That’s 154 to you and me

Source: Hubblesite.org

On this date 22 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope was borne into space on Shuttle Discovery, the one that recently did its last flyby over DC (well, okay, it had help) before delivery to the Udvar-Hazy center. The Hubble will be retired soon, and while this is viewed with some [...]

Too cool, part 13: I’m a spider, raargh!

Since I have yet to obtain any images illustrating this (and because there may not even be examples of such within this country, I may not ever, sniff,) I refer you to Alex Wild of Myrmecos fame, guest-blogging on Scientific American’s site, for his post on “The fly that banks on arachnophobia.”

If you [...]

Too cool, part 12: Won’t fit in the bag

Courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, I present one of the most interesting examples of unintuitive physics: the curvature of spacetime to produce a gravitational lens. The ring that you see here is not the shock wave from a supernova affecting the surrounding gases, as I first thought, but actually a blue [...]